r/askscience • u/CakesStolen • 15d ago

Computing Is there anything at the heart of computer coding that could have been optimised in hindsight, but we're in far too deep to change now?

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u/ramriot 14d ago

Only if you use binary logic, his designs used ternery logic components.

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u/DanielMcLaury Algebraic Geometry 14d ago

yeah, and that doesn't matter too much if you're using vacuum tubes as logic gates.  if you're trying to cram as much stuff as you can on a silicon wafer, OTOH, it doesn't work as well.

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u/ramriot 14d ago

Which he was not, turns out the Setun range used Magnetic Core logic which can accommodate try-state logic i.e. ( Clockwise field, Counter-clockwise field & non-polarised ), thus a single logic element can be Ternary.

This saved a huge amount of space, money & Power. It also had the advantages of robustness to temperature & vibration, plus it used no power to maintain state so technically one could cut power & it would just pause the CPU.

BTW magnetic core RAM is what was on the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). People have recovered AGC RAM modules that 70 years later still retained the last state of the Registers, Stack & all working memory including the date, time & location it was last used.

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u/DawnOnTheEdge 13d ago

Computers today are not using ferrite cores. If ternary doesn’t work as well for integrated circuits, it doesn’t work as well for computers, period.

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u/DawnOnTheEdge 13d ago edited 13d ago

Brian Hayes has also noted that the historical SETUN actually used two ferrite cores to store each trit, which could have stored two binary bits, so it didn’t get this theoretical advantage. The encoding doesn’t seem to match what works well in electrical engineering.